Rhythms of ‘Free’ movement:migrants' bodies and time under South Korean visa regime

Abstract

In 2005 the South Korean government granted a large-scale amnesty to the most predominant undocumented migrant group in the country, Korean Chinese. This change quickly caused Korean Chinese migrants to be exposed to new rhythms of transnational life imposed by work visa time limits. How do the rhythms of migration and temporal regulation – how long to stay and how often to move around – shape and reshape transnational working bodies and transnational spaces subjected to human flows and fluctuations? I argue that rhythms of ‘free’ movement strongly condition the migrants' temporal relationships with places and affect their ethnic working-class subjectivity. This case study of post-amnesty Korean Chinese migrant female workers contributes to research on the actual material forces of transnational temporality as well the visceral dimension of transnational migration, where state-imposed rhythms intersect with market-driven rhythms to reconfigure transnational time–space linkages, transnational bodies, and thereby transnational subjectivities, through rhythms of ‘free’ movement.

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